[Klug-general] Bill Gates is a Funny, Smart Conman

[Karl Lattimer]

On Tue, 2008-01-15 at 09:30 +0000, Karl Buckland wrote:
> Peter Childs wrote:
> > If Bill had not given us windows some body else would have given us 
> > something else much much worse.
> >
> > Mind you looking back the Atari, Amiga and early Mac were better than 
> > 3.1 in there day..... Saying that how much is my working Atari ST with 
> > 1Mb of Memory and 20Mb hard disk worth now....

Probably more than an IBM PC or clone running windows 2.0 (which I
believe was the same generation as the first Atari ST)

> > Peter.
> It is certainly debatable whether anyone else would have provided 
> something better. I'm glad it wasn't Apple, otherwise they'd be 
> controlling our software AND hardware. Can you imagine how painful that 
> might be?

This has turned into quite an interesting causality question... What
would the world have been like wrt operating systems if Sir Bill of
Seattle didn't exist.

Interesting links in the causal chain

 * Steve Jobs and Steve (the woz) Wozniak were members of homebrew
computer club and started apple.
 * Bill Gates was a member of homebrew computer club and started
microsoft.
 * Richard Stallman wasn't a member of homebrew computer club, but was
an MIT hacker at the time.

Firstly we need to look at a couple of interesting points... The only
influence Bill Gates had on Apple was BASIC, BASIC however wasn't
invented by Bill Gates or Paul Allen, it was in fact invented by John
George Kemeny and Thomas Eugene Kurtz at Dartmouth College. The fact
that Altair BASIC (the basis of Apple's BASIC shell) was invented by
Gates and Allen bares little relevance. Woz used BASIC because it was
highly available at the homebrew computer club chiefly because Gates and
Allen had written it for the Altair 8080. So if Apple didn't take BASIC
from Gates/Allen, they most likely would have taken it from one of the
many other implementations out there or written their own. So this could
have stumped them for about 6 months MAX.

By September 1983 Stallman was already on his quest to free software.
Was this a result of Bill Gates' letter to homebrew or more simply (and
generally reported by Stallman) a reaction to the price of UNIX
software. If it was the latter we're still in a sensible time frame for
the GNU GPL to make its debut in 1989 with lots of the GNU tools already
available but no kernel in sight.

So without Bill, Apple would have continued regardless, slowed down but
not stopped. By 1982 they adopted Objective-C and by 1984 had a GUI out
the now famous Macintosh, with associated adverts etc...

Without Bill, Stallman would have continued regardless. The big changes
in the timeline don't come until the late 80's and early 90's. Around
this time lots of mini, micro and 'other' computers were available
including the Atari and Amiga machines. IBM's venture into computing
during the 80s wouldn't have been DOS based, they would more likely have
taken some UNIX code and made it work on an x86 machine, Visicalc would
have been cloned by IBM and they would have knocked out a simple word
processor and started the project we now refer to as Lotus, Lotus would
have become the leading office package rather than MSO, but crucially
there is no DOS.

The Amiga and Atari machines had taken the lead from apple and windows
1.0 without windows 1.0 Amiga and Atari would have still had plenty of
inspiration, as the X server was invented in 1984 chances are IBM would
have adopted it, and had a graphical desktop running only a year or two
behind apple, and would have been superior to the Windows 1.0, and the
Win16 API.

Without the noodly programming at MS, IBM would probably done what most
UNIX users did to get their software especially under their "there's no
money in software" idea, they would have accumulated software from many
sources, and built office distributions based on their mish mash of GNU
and MIT tools. IBM would have jumped into the position of Microsoft,
after all it is their business to do business. 

Meanwhile the GNU project is hanging on and even soon to get their very
own X11 server and a kernel. IBM would have seen this as a major
breakthrough in the finances of computers and the price of workstations
running whatever IBM GUI on top of UNIX and X would have plummeted. 

IBM wouldn't have played such a violent game from the early 90s and
wouldn't have ended up in a DoJ anti-trust lawsuit, followed by EU
anti-trust etc...

Richard Stallman would have probably gotten very rich off the back of
GNU.

All in all I think we would have gotten where we are today quite a bit
faster, without the existence of the Win32 API - Software developers
would have been writing code on UNIX all along, when Apple adopt UNIX
the developers port to their desktop faster than possible with Win32 in
the way.

The big players would have changed, Novell probably wouldn't exist now,
IBM would be the big player and again, Apple following behind, however I
think the gap would be shorter between IBM and Apple and there would be
more free software in the world...

Remember the only thing that Bill Gates ever did that changed the world
was this ...
http://www.digibarn.com/collections/newsletters/homebrew/V2_01/homebrew_V2_01_p2.jpg
... and its hardly been for the better.

and in response to a couple of his questions:

Who can afford to do professional work for nothing?

  - I can, I already have a job, software is fun to write so I spend
free time on it.

What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs,
documenting his product and distribute for free?

 - This is 3 separate questions, firstly 3-man years is nothing when 50
people are working on the project, finding bugs and documenting is the
job of the crowd, crowd wisdom will prevail, distribution who cares,
we're giving away the source code, distributing it is YOUR job :P

Hope this entertains you all, causality is so much fun :)
K,